ist vom 18.03.11, aber interessant
Subprime Scandal: If the FDIC wants to be fair about suing Washington Mutual execs for "negligence," it should include politicians who supported the Community Reinvestment Act.
For that matter, it ought to include all the bank examiners — including its own — who enforced the reckless anti-discrimination regulation. The CRA pressured WaMu and other FDIC-insured banks to make the risky loans the FDIC now accuses them of "negligence" in allowing.
In its lawsuit, the agency says top WaMu officers acted with "reckless disregard" in adopting lending policies that caused the bank to make home loans "with little or no regard for borrowers' ability to repay them."
What gall.
The post-Clinton CRA ordered WaMu and other banks to adopt "flexible underwriting practices" and to target low-income borrowers in "predominantly minority neighborhoods." If they didn't pass the government's lending test, they couldn't expand.
So banks scrambled to originate subprime and other urban loans that would impress CRA regulators and the inner-city activists who influenced their decisions.
If anything, WaMu was guilty of overcompliance with the CRA — which is how it went from being an obscure Seattle lender to the country's sixth-largest bank. By passing its CRA exams with flying colors, it got government permission to buy dozens of other banks over the years.
For added insurance against the CRA's veto over its acquisitions, it pledged billions in loans to poor minority borrowers in deals with CRA shakedown groups, like the Greenlining Institute.
Ahead of its 2002 merger with Dime Bank, WaMu put up a whopping $375 billion in such commitments. "We have set our goal to double the number of loans made to borrowers of color by the end of the first year" of the 10-year deal, WaMu said in a press release.
Other major banks got caught up in the CRA racket. With WaMu, they pledged some $2 trillion in similarly risky mortgage commitments between 2001 and 2008.
WaMu, however, was the most eager to please. In 2003, it received the CRA Community Impact Award for its "flexible menu of loan products that can be personalized to meet the unique financial needs of customers, even when their loan may fall outside typical credit, income or debt constraints."
Of course, the dubious honor was bestowed before such risky loans collapsed with the subprime bubble, forcing WaMu into receivership.
www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/...A-Compliance.aspx